Deploying a vSAN Witness Appliance 6.7

In this blog post, we will see step by step deployment of vSAN witness appliance 6.7. In vSAN stretched & ROBO configurations we require witness appliance which serves the purpose of quorum. Instead of using physical ESXi host, we can use witness host ( virtual appliance). This appliance is pre-configured virtual machine that runs ESXi hypervisor. This witness host does not serve the purpose of running virtual machines.

The workflow to deploy and configure witness appliance includes this process:

» Download vSAN witness OVA template from VMware website

» Right click on cluster and click on “Deploy OVF Template”, click on next

» Select Local file option and choose files from download explorer, click on next

» Supply virtual machine name and select Data center object or VM folder, click on next

» Select a compute resource, I have selected Cluster object as vSphere DRS is automated, click on next

» Review all the details and click on next

» Accept the EULA and click on next

» Select the configuration type. I have selected “Tiny” for lab purposes and click on next

» You can place appliance storage at any storage type ( vmfs, vsan etc.). Make sure you are not placing appliance storage on same ROBO or stretched cluster which it will be part of as a quorum.

» By default, appliance has two networks. One for witness traffic and one for management traffic. This configuration will be done when we add the witness host in vCenter Server. Click on next

» Supply the root password for witness appliance and click on next

» Review the configuration and click on finish.

» OVF deployment is in process and has been completed successfully. You can see that virtual machine “VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness” is ready to power on.

» Right click on “VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness” and power on the same. It will then load ESXi hypervisor and complete the installation. Post installation, complete the networking configuration of the appliance and test network connectivity. if connectivity is good, follow next steps.

» Next step is to add the witness host in vCenter Server. Use the same wizard to add the host and click on next

» Witness host comes with its own license and you need not to apply any license configuration on it. Click on next

» You can see that witness host is added successfully in vCenter Server and showing in “light blue” color. Witness IP address is 192.168.2.152

In the next blog post we will discuss about configuring network interfaces for witness traffic.

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